I have long documented Google’s preference toward brands, while Google has always stated that they don’t really think of brand.

While not thinking of brands, someone on the Google UI team later added navigational aids to the search results promoting popular brands – highlighting the list of brands with the label “brands” before the list of links.

Take a look at what Matt Cutts shares in the following video, where he tries to compare brand domain names vs keyword domain names. He highlights brand over and over again, and then when he talks about exact match domains getting a bonus or benefit, he highlights that Google may well dial that down soon.

Now if you are still on the fence, let me just give you a bit of color. that we have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, some people have complained that we are giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. So we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it. – Matt Cutts

For years the Google algorithm moved in one direction, and that was placing increased emphasis on brand and domain authority. That created the content farm problem, but with the content farm update they figured out how to dial down a lot of junk hollow authority sites. They were able to replace “on-topic-ness” with “good-ness,” according to the search quality engineer who goes by the nickname moultano. As part of that content farm update, they dialed up brands to the point where now doorway pages are ranking well (so long as they are hosted on brand websites).

Google keeps creating more signals from social media and how people interact with the search results. A lot of those types of signals are going to end up favoring established brands which have large labor forces offline marketing + distribution channels. Google owns about 97% of the mobile search market, so more and more of that signal will eventually end up bleeding into the online world.

In addition to learning from the firehose of mobile search data, Google is also talking about selling hotel ads on a price per booking. Google can get a taste of any transaction simply by offering free traffic in exchange for giving them the data needed to make a marketplace then requiring access to the best deals discounts:

It is believed that Google requires participating hotels to provide Google Maps with the lowest publicly available rates, for stays of one to seven nights, double occupancy, with arrival days up to 90 days ahead.

In a world where Google has business volume data, clientele demographics, pricing data, and customer satisfaction data for most offline businesses they don’t really need to place too much weight on links or domain names. Businesses can be seen as being great simply by being great.*

(*and encouraging people to stuff the ballot box for them with discounts ' class='wp-smiley' /> )

Classical SEO signals (on-page optimization, link anchor text, domain names, etc.) have value up until a point, but if Google is going to keep mixing in more and more signals from other data sources then the value of any single signal drops. I haven’t bought any great domain names in a while, and with Google’s continued brand push and Google coming over the top with more ad units (in markets like credit cards and mortgage) I am seeing more and more reason to think harder about brand. It seems that is where Google is headed. The link graph is rotted out by nepotism paid links. Domain names are seen as a tool for speculation a short cut. It is not surprising Google is looking for more signals.

How have you adjusted your strategies of late? What happens to the value of domain names if EMD bonus goes away Google keeps adding other data sources?

New to the site? Join for Free and get over $300 of free SEO software.

Once you set up your free account you can comment on our blog, and you are eligible to receive our search engine success SEO newsletter.

Already have an account? Login to share your opinions.

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/googles-matt-cutts-talks-down-keyword-domain-names

There are so many competitive research tools on the market. We reviewed some of the larger ones here but there are quite a few more on the market today.

The truth is that you can really get a lot of good, usable data to give you an idea of what the competition is likely to be by using free tools or the free version of paid tools.

Some of the competitive research tools out there (the paid ones) really are useful if you are going to scale way up with some of your SEO or PPC plans but many of the paid versions are overkill for a lot of webmasters.

Choosing Your Tools

Most tools come with the promises of “UNCOVERING YOUR COMPETITORS BEST _____”.

That blank can be links, keywords, traffic sources, and so on. As we know, most competitive research tools are rough estimates at best and almost useless estimates at worst. Unless you get your hands on your competition’s analytics reports, you are still kind of best-guessing. In this example we are looking for the competitiveness of a core keyword.

Best-guessing really isn’t a bad thing so long as you realize that what you are doing is really triangulating data points and looking for patterns across different tools. Keep in mind many tools use Google’s data so you’ll want to try to reach beyond Google’s data points a bit and hit up places like:

• Wordtracker, who powers our keyword tool
• Microsoft Ad Intelligence
• Link research tools like Blekko (well, mainly a search engine but lots of sweet SEO data there), Open Site Explorer, and Majestic
• Competitive research tools like Compete.com

The lure of competitive research is to get it done quickly and accurately. However, gauging the competition of a keyword or market can’t really be done with a push of the button as there are factors that come into play which a push-button tool cannot account for, such as:

• how hard is the market to link build for?
• is the vertical dominated by brands and thick EMD’s?
• what is your available capital?
• are the ranking sites knowledgeable about SEO or are they mostly ranking on brand authority/domain authority? (how tight is their site structure, how targeted is their content, etc)
• is Google giving the competing sites a brand boost?
• is Google integrating products, images, videos, local results, etc?

Other questions might be stuff like “how is Google Instant skewing this keyword marketplace” or “is Google firing a vertical search engine for these results (like local” or “is Google placing 3 AdWords ads at the top of the search results” or “is Google making inroads into the market” like they are with mortgage rates.

People don’t search in an abstract mathematical world, but by using their fingers and eyes. Looking at the search results matters. Quite a bit of variables come into play which require some human intuition and common sense. A research tool is only as good as the person using it, you have to know what you are looking at what to be aware of.

Getting the Job Done

In this example I decided to use the following tools:

• SEO For Firefox
• Open Site Explorer

Yep, just 2 free tools…. ' class='wp-smiley' />

So we are stipulating that you’ve already selected a keyword. In this case I picked a generic keyword for the purposes of going through how to use the tools. Plug your keyword into Google, flip on SEO for Firefox and off you go!

This is actually a good example of where a push button tool might bite the dust. You’ve got Related Search breadcrumbs at the top, Images in the #1 spot, Shopping in the #3 spot, and News (not pictured) in the #5 spot.

So wherever you thought you might rank, just move yourself down a 1-3 spots depending on where you would be in the SERPS. This can have a large effect on potential traffic and revenue so you’ll want to evaluate the SERP prior to jumping in.

You might decide that you need to shoot for 1 or 2 rather than top 3 or top 5 given all the other stuff Google is integrating into this results page. Or you might decide that the top spot is locked up and the #2 position is your only opportunity, making the risk to reward ratio much less appealing.

With SEO for Firefox you can quickly see important metrics like:

• Yahoo! links to domain/page
• domain age
• Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO link data
• presence in strong directories
• potential, estimated traffic value from SEM Rush

Close up of SEO for Firefox data:

Basically by looking at the results page you can see what other pieces of universal search you’ll be competing with, whether the home page or a sub-page is ranking, and whether you are competing with brands and/or strong EMD’s.

With SEO for Firefox you’ll see all of the above plus the domain age, domain links, page links, listings in major directories, position in other search engines, and so on. This will give you a good idea of potential competitiveness of this keyword for free and in about 5 seconds.

It is typically better easier to measure the few smaller sites that managed to rank rather than measuring the larger authoritative domains. Why? Well…

• Google’s brand boost isn’t something you can replicate if you are just starting out
• Google sometimes ranks internal pages based on the authority of the homepage
• analyzing smaller chunks of data is easier than analyzing huge sets of data

Checking Links

So now that you know how many links are pointing to that domain/page you’ll want to check how many unique domains are pointing in and what the anchor text looks like, in addition to what the quality of those links might be.

Due to its ease of use (in addition to the data being good) I like to use Open Site Explorer from SeoMoz in these cases of quick research. I will use their free service for this example, which requires no log in, and they are even more generous with data when you register for a free account.

The first thing I do is head over to the anchor text distribution of the site or page to see if the site/page is attracting links specific to the keyword I am researching:

What’s great here is you can see the top 5 instances of anchor text usage, how many total links are using that term, and how many unique domains are supplying those total links.

You can also see data relative to the potential quality of the entire link profile in addition to the ratio of total/unique domains linking in.

You probably won’t want or need to do this for every single keyword you decide to pursue. However, when looking at a new market, a potential core keyword, or if you are considering buying an exact match domain for a specific keyword you can accomplish a really good amount of competitive research on that keyword by using a couple free tools.

Types of Competitive Research

Competitive research is a broad term and can go in a bunch of different directions. As an example, when first entering a market you would likely start with some keyword research and move into analyzing the competition of those keywords before you decide to enter or fully enter the market.

As you move into bigger markets and start to do more enterprise-level competitive research specific to a domain, link profiles, or a broader market you might move into some paid tools.

Analysis paralysis is a major issue in SEO. Many times you might find that those enterprise-level tools really are overkill for what you might be trying to do initially. Gauging the competitiveness of a huge keyword or a lower volume keyword really doesn’t change based on the money you throw at a tool. The data is the data especially when you narrow down the research to a keyword, keywords, or domains.

Get the Data, Make a Decision

So with the tools we used here you are getting many of the key data points you need to decide whether pursuing the keyword or keywords you have chosen is right for you.

Some things the tools cannot tell you are questions we talked about before:

• how much captial can you allocate to the project?
• how hard are you willing to work?
• do you have a network of contacts you can lean on for advice and assistance?
• do you have enough patience to see the project through, especially if ranking will take a bit..can you wait on the revenue?
• is creativity lacking in the market and can you fill that void or at least be better than what’s out there?

Only you can answer those questions ' class='wp-smiley' />

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/quick-dirty-competitive-research

Shortly after we found out that Google was to purchase Beat That Quote we highlighted how Google purchased a website that was deeply engaged in numerous nefarious black hat SEO practices. A friend just pinged me to confirm that Google has penalized the domain by removing it from the search results.

From a competition market regulation perspective that was a smart move for Google. They couldn’t leave it in the search results while justifying handing out penalties to any of its competitors. As an added bonus, the site is building up tons of authoritative links in the background from all the buzz about being bought by Google. Thus when Google allows it to rank again in 30 days it will rank better than ever.

Based on their web dominance which generates such a widespread media buzz, Google adds millions of Pounds worth of inbound links to any website they buy.

The message Google sends to the market with this purchase is that you should push to get the attention of Google’s hungry biz dev folks before you get scrutiny from their search quality team. After the payday the penalty is irrelevant because you already have cash in hand the added links from the press mentioning the transaction will more than offset any spam links you remove. Month 1 revenues might be slightly lower, but months 2 through x will be far higher.

New to the site? Join for Free and get over $300 of free SEO software.

Once you set up your free account you can comment on our blog, and you are eligible to receive our search engine success SEO newsletter.

Already have an account? Login to share your opinions.

Comments

I just checked and it still ranks for it’s name, just very low (ie. ~66 in both the US and UK), and the same for all of the near or exact match title rankings I looked at. It still gives sitelinks if you search on the domain name though, and the homepage still has a PageRank of 6, so it definitely looks like more of a temporary hand job than something that was meant to be long term. If nothing else they could still sell some links off of their homepage. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t buy links from a property that is about to get acquired by Google? ' class='wp-smiley' />

this still seems to me like google is further positioning itself to monoplize every high margin vertical from travel to finance ,they seem to care less about government regulators breaking them up…

Start a rumor that your domain is being bought by Google.

I just don’t know why they will buy them out and help them build backlink with all this buzz and come back stronger then ever..not smart.

“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”

They probably didn´t buy beattheqoute to maintain the website, but to integrate them with a box to a Google comparision site above all other AdWords ads.

Btw. A view at their rankings at sistrix.co.uk Toolbox shows that their rankings aren´t that good anyway. Before their penalty, Sistrix found 2000 positions in the Google Top100, but only 5,5 % of that is from page 1. Next week data will be interesting …

How do I get Google to buy my company? ha ha
I kinda agree with @mcgelligot, starting the rumor will get some buzz worked up.

The amount of Gaming that seems to be going on never fails to disgust.

I’m getting to the point that it seems most links are not to be trusted. Now BING wants to throw
social signals into the mix with search via FaceBook, since we’ve ruined the goodwill of websites.

Problem is that when celebrities like Katy Perry gets paid 10K per tweet. I think the prospect of trying to beat scammers using the social graph is going to fail, miserably as well, then we can stop trusting each other as well.

I think Google should employ facecam recognition on all screen. When ever a surfer rolls there eyes in disgust or unhappiness, or smashes the keyboard, or similar biometrics..a signal should be sent to the offending site, nuking them into oblivion. Until that day comes hopefully soon. I have to try to out think the SEO who’s posting endless crap to rank sites, so I can get a decent search result when I need something.

The only ranking that seems matter these days is the fresh smell of offending sites. Keep up the great work Aaron.

Searchengineman

@wheelel23, yeah, this sounds like a better strategy than Spamming. We have been sponsoring reviews, posting on forums and doing all the hard SEO work, but there’s no rumor so far

New to the site? Join for Free and get over $300 of free SEO software.

Once you set up your free account you can comment on our blog, and you are eligible to receive our search engine success SEO newsletter.

Already have an account? Login to share your opinions.

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/beat-it-beat-it

You can’t learn great SEO from an e-book. Or buying software tools.

Great SEO is built on an understanding.

Reducing SEO To Prescription

One of the problems with reductive, prescribed SEO approaches – i.e. step one: research keywords, step two: put keyword in title etc can be seen in the recent “Content Farm” update.

When Google decide sites are affecting their search quality, they look for a definable, repeated footprint made by the sites they deem to be undesirable. They then design algorithms that flag and punish the sites that use such a footprint.

This is why a lot of legitimate sites get taken out in updates. A collection of sites may not look, to a human, like problem sites, but the algo sees them as being the same thing, because their technical footprint is the same. For instance, a website with a high number of 250-word pages is an example of a footprint. Not necessarily an undesirable one, but a footprint nevertheless. Similar footprints exist amongst ecommerce sites heavy in sitewide templating but light on content unique to the page.

Copying successful sites is a great way to learn, but can also be a trap. If you share a similar footprint, having followed the same SEO prescription, you may go down with them if Google decides their approach is no longer flavor of the month.

The Myth Of White Hat

A lot of sites that get taken out are white hat i.e. sites that follow Google’s webmaster guidelines.

It’s a reasonably safe approach, but if you understand SEO, you’ll soon realize that following a white hat prescription offers no guarantees of ranking, nor does it offer any guarantees you won’t be taken out.

The primary reason there aren’t any guarantees comes down to numbers. Google knows that when it makes a change, many sites will lose. They also know that many sites will win i.e. replace the sites that lost. If your site drops out, Google aren’t bothered. There will be plenty of other sites to take your place. Google are only concerned that their users perceive the search results to be of sufficient quality.

The exception is if your site really is a one-of-a-kind. The kind of site that would embarrass Google if users couldn’t find it. BMW, for example, in response to the query “BMW”.

It’s not fair, but we understand that’s just how life is.

An Understanding

For those readers new to SEO, in order to really grasp SEO, you need to see things from the search engines point of view.

Firstly, understand the search engines business case. The search engine can only make money if advertisers pay for search traffic. If it were too easy for those sites who are likely to use PPC to rank highly in the natural results, then the search engines business model is undermined. Therefore, it is in the search engines interest to “encourage” purely commercial entities to use PPC, not SEO. One way they do this is to make the natural results volatile and unpredictable. There are exceptions, covered in my second point.

Secondly, search engines must provide sufficient information quality to their users. This is an SEO opportunity, because without webmasters producing free-to-crawl, quality content, there can be no search engine business model. The search engines must nurture this ecosystem.

If you provide genuine utility to end users, the search engines have a vested interest in your survival, perhaps not as an individual, but certainly as a group i.e. “quality web publishers”. Traffic is the lifeblood of the web, and if quality web publishers aren’t fed traffic, they die. The problem, for webmasters, is that the search engines don’t care about any one “quality publisher”, as there are plenty of quality publishers. The exception is if you’re the type of quality publisher who has a well recognized brand, and would therefore give the impression to users that Google was useless if you didn’t appear.

Thirdly, for all their cryptic black box genius, search engines aren’t all that sophisticated. Yes, the people who run them are brilliant. The problems they solve are very difficult. They have built what, only decades ago, would have been considered magic. But, at the end of the day, it’s just a bit of maths trying to figure out a set of signals. If you can work out what that set of signals are, the maths will – unblinkingly – reward you. It is often said that in the search engine wars, the black hats will be the last SEOs standing.

Fourthly, the search engines don’t really like you. They identified you as a business risk in their statement to investors. You can, potentially, make them look bad. You can undermine their business case. You may compete with their own channels for traffic. They tolerate you because they need publishers making their stuff easy to crawl, and not locking their content away behind paywalls. Just don’t expect a Christmas card.

SEO Strategy Built On Understanding

Develop strategies based on how a search engine sees the world.

For example, if you’re a known brand, your approach will be different to a little known, generic publisher. There isn’t really much risk you won’t appear, as you could embarrass Google if users can’t find you. This is the reason BMW were reinstated so quickly after falling foul of Google’s guidelines, but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to lesser known publishers.

If you like puzzles, then testing the algorithms can give you an unfair advantage. It’s a lot harder than it used to be, but where there is difficulty, there is a barrier to entry to those who come later. Avoid listening to SEO echo chambers where advice may be well-meaning, but isn’t based on rigorous testing.

If you’re a publisher, not much into SEO wizardry, and you create content that is very similar to content created by others, you should focus on differentiation. If there are 100′s of publishers just like you, then Google doesn’t care if you disappear. Google do need to find a way to reward quality, especially in niches that aren’t well covered. Be better than the rest, but if you’re not, slice your niche finer and finer, until you’re the top dog in your niche. You should focus on building brand, so you can own a search stream. For example, this site owns the search stream “SEO Book”, a stream Aaron created and built up.

Remember, search engines don’t care about you, unless there’s something in it for them.

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/danger-following-prescription

There are many things to consider when designing your site, including your audience, what the site is going to be about, how it looks and feels, and the overall aesthetics. However, looks will only get you so far. You can have the best looking site on the Internet, but if no one can find you in the major search engines (Google and Bing) – what’s the point?

Fortunately for the layman, Microsoft has invented a tool called WebMatrix, which takes a lot of the guess work out of the equation. It lets web developers do what they do best – develop websites – without having to worry too much about the art of search engine optimization.

WebMatrix is a free program that allows you to create, customize, and publish websites to the web. You can build your site from scratch using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS – sprinkling in some ASP.Net functionality – or you can use an open source content management system such as WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke, or Orchard.

Broken down into its core pieces, WebMatrix consists of four “Workspaces,” each dealing with a separate aspect of web development: Site, Files, Databases, and Reports. For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing on just one of these elements: Reports.

No matter which method you use to create your site, the SEO Reports will scan your site’s overall structure, seeking out any issues you may have with regards to search engine optimization. If it finds any errors or areas where you could improve, it provides recommendations for optimizing them.

This functionality works whether you are building your site from a directory on your desktop or have already published the site to the web. Once WebMatrix displays its suggestions, you can even click on a button and be taken to the exact spot in your code (or the file on your desktop) where the optimization needs to be applied – truly one of the strongest features of the application in my book.

In addition to scanning the overall structure of your website, the SEO Reports Tool also examines key elements in your code and checks to see if they were created properly. While we all agree that content is king, structure is the throne it sits upon – and you don’t want to have your king sitting on a wobbly chair!
A few of the elements that the WebMatrix SEO Report looks at are:

Title Tags

Title tags are pieces of text that describe web pages on the Internet. You can see their effect at the top left-hand corner of your browser:

Aside from describing your page’s content and relevancy in a user’s browser, they also appear on the search engine result pages. A well-written title is not only more likely to get a user to click on your link, but can also position it higher in the search engine results (SERPs).

Title tags are arguably the most important on-page piece of SEO that you can add to your site, and because of this, the WebMatrix SEO Report takes special care when analyzing this vital element in your website.
It does so by checking things like the overall length of characters in your title (ideally, it should be no more than 70 characters in total), placement of keywords within the title tag, and so forth.

If it finds an error, it provides a suggestion with information on why it is not optimized properly and what steps to take to ensure it gets fixed.

Meta Descriptions

While Google no longer considers Meta descriptions in its ranking algorithms, they are still an important part of your site’s search engine optimization. When a user searches for a keyword on one of the major engines, the search results displayed show the page’s title tag, followed by a description of what the page or site is about. This description comes from – you guessed it – the Meta description.

If this is missing, or not well thought out, chances are users will bypass your result, looking for a page that is more relevant to their needs.

Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3)

Headers are a pivotal part of a website’s structure and act as a visual aid to the users, allowing them to better understand the structure of your document. Headers do the same for search engine crawlers, helping them to make more semantic sense of your pages.

Ideally, header tags should follow a certain pattern and should always contain keywords relevant to your topic. WebMatrix’s SEO Tool helps to ensure that they do.

Image Descriptions (Alt tags)

Another important aspect of SEO – and an often overlooked one – is image descriptions. Just as a good caption helps readers understand a picture, image descriptions help provide clarity to search engines about what your picture contains. Remember, search engines cannot see your image, so the only way they know what your image is about is if you tell them.

As tools like Google and Bing Image Search become more and more popular, making sure your images are properly optimized becomes increasingly important.

Summary

When you run the SEO Report on your website, it will identify these issues and other opportunities for improving your website’s optimization, and provide recommendations for improving them, too. The examples above are but a few of the factors that the WebMatrix SEO Report Tool considers when it reviews your site; we’ve literally just touched the tip of the iceberg in this article. Some other things the program allows you to do are:

• Check your inbound and outbound links.
• Get an accurate count of keywords on your page.
• Locate page violations and resolve them, as shown below:

 

 
If you want to learn more about how to get started with WebMatrix and the SEO Report, I encourage you to visit the tutorial Get Started with SEO Using WebMatrix, which includes a step-by-step guide and video.

To learn about some of the more advanced features the WebMatrix SEO Report offers, visit the article – Improve Your Website Using The WebMatrix SEO Report.

 

More Search Optimization Articles
More By Rick Johnson

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Optimizing-Your-Sites-SEO-with-WebMatrix/